Welcome to Literary Friction. I'm Carrie Plitt, here as always with my co-host Octavia Bright. Hello, Octavia. Hi, Carrie.

The essay is a slippery and expansive form, which can encompass both a dispatch from a cruise ship

and an attempt to define the word camp. It's much remarked upon that the word essay

itself originates from the verb to try in French, which gives it an error of incompleteness,

something not yet finished, but which gives evidence of a mind at work. Wow, I really

wrote some of that thesis there. It's not usually how my interests go. I haven't read that back in a while. Oops. Oh, well. Let's keep going. Today, we will be trying ourselves to dig into the form of the essay and discussing some of our favorite essay writers, including Michel de Montaigne, Joan Did I really butcher that? I did. Oh,. Only time. Yeah. Okay. Just tell us who our guest

is today, Octavia. Joining us today is the wonderful Brian Dillon, who very brilliantly is about to publish

a book of essays about essays called essayism. So it was a perfect aligning of stars for us. Brian was born in

Dublin in 1969, and his previous books include

The Great Explosion, which was shortlisted for the Ondarchi Prize, Tormented Hope, shortlisted

for the Welcome Book Prize and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction.

And his writing has also appeared in The Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books and Freeze.

So he's all over the place.

And he's the UK editor of Cabinet Magazine.

And he also teaches at the Royal College of Art in London.

And he's great.

He is great.

In addition to talking to Brian, we'll be discussing essays more generally and also giving our book recommendations.

So come give it the old college try with us for the next hour on Larry Friction.

I love it when you go, corner. I love it. So corny. I'm sorry. No, I love it.

The revealing the true depth of yourself. So we called Brian last week to talk about essayism.

Brian Dillon, thank you so much for being with us on Literary Friction.

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